You think laws are going to come to the workers' rescue in 2019? We are in a new Gilded Age, just about where we started before there were unions at all. There are rich Republicans so corrupt they actually want child labor laws repealed -- and why not? By the time Betsy De Vos finishes wrecking public schools, what's a kid going to do anyway but help mom and dad scramble to try to put food on the table.
How were the unions made? Well, people were tougher then -- unions were built around manual labor in factories, mills, and mines. The inequities were so extremely evident. And with vanishingly few exceptions, bosses had no intention of sharing the wealth, much less allowing unions in. They called in police, and hired goons and thugs of their own. So laborers fought back. And bled, and died. The workers struck -- they tried to have some funds to at least keep people fed while strikes dragged on. The workers punished scabs and strikebreakers.
My labor history's a little rusty, but I will say this: I think the GOP has set us back a century. I have watched unions disrespected, minimized, sidelined, and broken. Pronounced irrelevant and then vanished. All the rights they fought and bled for that had a ripple effect on all workers eroded. I mean -- the "gig economy" is just a fancy way of saying a person can work 24/7 and never ever ever get ahead.
What I've seen of Jeff Bezos, and to an even greater extent Mark Zuckerberg, is a person who's a variety of idiot savant: immensely, amazingly, gifted in one area of life, and utterly lacking in all the rest. They have been rewarded beyond the dreams of avarice for their talents, and they see NO reason why they should either share or modify their behavior toward people who work for them or use their products.
Unless Bezos turns out to have or develop a streak of common humanity I have not yet seen, Amazon's workers will eventually have to unionize, negotiate, and learn how to go on strike and hurt him. See above; I have no illusions that it would be easy. But if they don't unionize themselves -- all by themselves with no one's permission, they might as well resign themselves to a life of abject servitude.
I'm sorry if I sound dystopian, but living through Bush/Cheney and now Trump has done that to me.
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